Spectrum Labs Partnership
We’re excited to announce a partnership with Spectrum Labs to implement machine learning models for proactively fighting bad actors on our platform. This will be an ongoing project: first we’re focusing on fighting drugs, solicitation, and underage users; then we’ll move to harassment; eventually we hope to build tools that could encourage friendlier behavior and safer interactions.
Spectrum and the Grindr Trust and Safety team are working together to train models carefully, and specifically for our user base, so that they are as accurate and fair as we can make them. Our goal is to implement machine learning with an ethical, human-centered framework that is in our community’s best interest and helps make Grindr a safer, more inclusive place for everyone. Spectrum Labs is a great partner for us – they recently put out a whitepaper on moderation best practices for the LGBTQ+ community – a nice complement to some of our own work.
Historically, Grindr has reviewed potentially illicit text on Grindr through two means: reports from our community and keywording. Reports from our community are crucial, and give us much-needed insight and context, and keywording allows us to detect content proactively, but is also limited – there can be a high number of false positives, terms change quickly, and context can be lost
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Machine learning will help us detect and take action on bad actors and illicit content automatically, which frees up our moderators to concentrate on the nuanced, difficult cases that really need their attention. Our moderators’ mental health is important to us, and this is one step we can take to make their jobs better.
We know that machine learning isn’t perfect, and that’s why we will still operate our industry-leading ban-appeal process, which gives all of our users the right to have a manual human review of any automated decision.
Because it’s important to get this right, we’re going to take our time to implement these models carefully over the next year. This is a big step, and I’m excited for what we’ll be able to do to improve the experience for our users all over the world.
